Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (14 page)

“I said get out,” she said, gunning the idle. “Get the fuck out.”

He lit another cigarette and walked over to where a dozen or so riders waited with their luggage, Aggie leaving rubber in second gear.

Manfred Pfiser had never been arrested in the United States, in his native Netherlands, or anywhere else. He chipped out a nice living for himself with his imports and exports, he was even-steven with the Dutch taxman, and he was all caught up on his alimony and child support. Another Euroman on an extended vacation, soaking up sunshine and neon. The difference between him and a few thousand other guys, besides his cocaine sideline, was that Pfiser left the party early, and against his will.

The traces in his suitcase tested out almost eighty percent pure. That much was rare in quantities under a kilo. Your strongest kick-ass street gram came in around twenty-five, and if you were copping in some after-hours dive, ten percent would be about the best you could get your hands on. Martinson theorized Pfiser went down holding large, a package that’d be worth killing for.

Being the savvy businessman he was, Pfiser no doubt had profits of his own to maximize, but to the heavyweights, to the real gangsters, he would’ve been a customer, and these people had grown far too shrewd to cut into their own market share. And the murder weapon, which Martinson didn’t have, was a piece of evidence that mitigated against a professional hit.

Crime Scene recovered one bullet fragment from a chair and dug another out of the plaster. A third piece was removed from the wound during the autopsy. A small bit remained missing and it probably always would, but there was enough of the slug for Dade Ballistics to determine it had been fired from a Lorcin 380, a classic Saturday Night Special that could be bought brand new in the box for about a hundred bucks.

Cheap automatics had a reputation for jamming, and this particular model, manufactured after 1990, had had something shoved into it, scratching the inside of the barrel. That made it more inaccurate than it would ordinarily be. Actual discharge of this firearm was indulging in unintentional Russian roulette. The shooter would be lucky if the thing didn’t blow up in his hand.

No self-respecting hood went anywhere near a gun like this.

The bad boys were goofy for sophisticated hardware. Berettas and Glocks, Walthers. It was a point of pride and street cred for these knuckleheads, who at least knew the difference between the real McCoy and a piece of shit like the Lorcin. So Arnie took a guess: The shooter was a punk who stumbled across a payday, a small-timer with the luckiest chance of a short, wasted life.

They found loads of fingerprints it took nearly a month to account for. Shug’s team lifted a full set of ten from a windowsill, and there was a partial on the portable stereo that they couldn’t match up with anybody, maid, electrician, or cable TV guy, who might reasonably been in the room. After exhausting his Florida resources, Martinson had the unidentified prints forwarded to the FBI’s Science Crime Lab in Washington. It had already been a week, and it could easily take another, to find matches in their infinite computer files. That’s if they had them at all.

The current crime of the century occurred in Colorado, and it might not have been a crime at all. A packed-to-the-vents 747 went down over the Rocky Mountains, shortly after take-off from the Denver airport. That was the plane-crash phrase. Shortly after take-off. The disaster cast suspicion on foreign terrorists and the usual knot of pissed-off white guys who blew up Federal Buildings and shot it out with over-armed G-men, but the FBI, backed up by the FAA, refused to issue any definitive statement until all the evidence was in, and since it was spread out over five or six square miles, it’d be a while before all the evidence was in.

The Colorado crash ended Pfiser’s brief run in the headlines, the same way the Pfiser murder displaced the attack on Josephine Simmons, which had left people sufficiently appalled for several slow news days.

At approximately two o’clock on a February afternoon, Ms. Simmons, a seventy-nine-year-old woman, was trundling toward the efficiency she’d lived in since 1963, carrying a can of chunk light tuna, a frozen box of spinach, and two grapefruits. Her handbag dangled from her right arm. When an assailant ran up behind her to snatch it, Josephine Simmons, out of pride or fear or stubbornness, decided she wasn’t going to give it up. Or maybe there hadn’t been any decision-making process. Maybe she merely reacted the wrong way. Whatever it was, she fought for the purse. This left the perp no course of action but to pound the woman into submission, and in his rush to escape, he left the handbag on the sidewalk. It contained the grand total of eight dollars and fifty-four cents.

The media seized on the sum as if to say, See? See how cheap the life of an eighty-nine-pound old lady really is? Like if there’d been a few thousand in the bag, they would’ve understood.

Nobody witnessed the crime, or nobody came forward and admitted they witnessed the crime, and that was odd, considering it occurred in a residential neighborhood at two o’clock in the afternoon. Robotaille and Acevedo canvassed the area, but no one could furnish even a partial description of the attacker, and after two weeks, their investigation was pretty much dead in the water.

Until one concerned citizen responded to a call of conscience and a televised Crime Stoppers program, and phoned Beach detectives. Acting anonymously, the tipster fingered one Anton Canter, an area crackhead and two-bit dealer who’d taken a few raps for possession and sales, and was between jolts in the Florida penal system.

With some assault beefs on his record, Canter fit the profile flush, and Arnie, Acevedo, Robotaille and even Kramer at one point gave him the latter-day hot light and rubber hose. They held him for twenty-three hours without charging him. They kept him awake and they kept him hungry.

Through it all, Canter stuck to the alibi that he’d been in his outpatient drug-rehab program. The counselor vouched for him, and so did some of the other druggies in his group. His name was in the clinic’s daybook. Anton Canter was a largely worthless human being, more than capable of this crime. However, the facts he based his alibi on suggested he didn’t do it.

Martinson was driving north on Washington Avenue when he pulled over and made a quick dash across the street into Burger King. He ordered two Whoppers with Cheese. Hoping nobody would catch him committing this crime against his cholesterol levels, he skulked back to the car and wolfed down the burgers with a side order of guilt, one after the other. He polished off the last few bites of the second and wiped his fingers on the bag, before heading into the florist’s. After selecting three yellow tulips and three sprigs of honeysuckle, he drove to Mt. Sinai hospital.

Josephine Simmons had lain in this bed, comatose, since the day of her attack. She looked like a child dying of starvation, minus the bloated belly. She was wired to one machine that displayed her heartbeat on a screen and a second that monitored her breathing. IVs pierced either arm and a hose pumped oxygen into her nostrils.

With a little bad luck, and who didn’t have that, life could come to this. Three quarters of a century of loneliness and struggle, and here you were in a hospital, stranded between living and dying. It was scary. The chances were pretty good Martinson could wind up the same way, after a heart attack or a stroke or a bout with cancer. Retired and out of the loop, a couple people who remembered him from his cop days, Lili and Robotaille, say, would visit him and bring him flowers he couldn’t see, until he became a nuisance people would rather forget about, wondering why he didn’t just hurry up and die. Life was seldom fair. Martinson had gotten his mind around this a long time ago, but the cruel tricks it managed to come up with sometimes knocked the breath right out of him.

The water in the vase he filled last week had evaporated to an inch from the bottom, murky with dust and shriveled petals. He threw the old flowers in the garbage, rinsed the vase in the bathroom sink, and filled it about halfway. He put the fresh flowers inside. The scent of honeysuckle filled the room and chased away the modern, antiseptic smell.

Martinson chattered, arranging the flowers on a night-stand. “Here’s a card,” he said, spotting a religious greeting from an order of nuns. “It’s signed by a Sister Bridget in Des Moines. A picture of some saint.” The icon had its arms spread, palms out and ready to embrace. “It says they’re praying for you to get well.”

The doctor told Martinson his visits might not be helping, but they couldn’t possibly be doing any harm. He encouraged him to keep it up. This was an honest doctor, a short guy with tight curls, who gave Arnie the truth early on when Arnie was wondering who else came to see her. And when he asked about her condition, whether it was like being asleep or being knocked out or what, the doctor admitted coma was something they didn’t know that much about. The young doctor hadn’t honed his bluffing instinct. He was the first doctor Martinson heard say, I don’t know.

Arnie took the chair at Josephine’s bedside and let three meaty fingers rest in her palm. Josephine wrapped her hand around them, the way she always did. The first time, he jumped up to find that honest doctor and tell him what happened, thinking he’d been present for some major breakthrough. The man informed him it happened all the time. A reflex. Again, it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t necessarily mean all that much either.

But it convinced him Josephine Simmons was in there somewhere. Shallow chest moving up and down, eyes shut, bony fingers squeezing with a surprising strength, the way a baby could startle you with how much power they had in their tiny fists. Under the wires and tubes and plastic attachments, a human being whose life had basic fundamental value was fighting to get out.

He said, “You rest up and try to get better, Josephine. I gotta get back to work, but I’ll be by to see you next week. The flowers are beautiful. Yellow tulips. And you can’t miss that honeysuckle, right?”

Martinson made a move to get out of the chair, and as he stood, he thought he felt Josephine’s fingers tighten their grip, but it was possible he only imagined it.

The prevailing sentiment around the job was that John Kramer’s ascension to lieutenant had as much to do with his skill at navigating Department politics as it did with any leadership qualities he may have possessed. Kramer was in place before Acevedo got here, but Robotaille and other veterans related the disappointment they felt when Arnie Martinson didn’t get the promotion.

Arnie would’ve claimed he wasn’t interested in the job. He would have said Kramer made a fine lieutenant, and he would’ve denied there was any rivalry between them, but they often disagreed on policy. Like whether or not to make the composite of their suspect in the Pfiser murder public. Kramer was for, Martinson dead set against.

The following events proved the Martinson instincts sharp:

1) Patrolman Kenneth Simms, recovering from a gunshot wound and probably considering another line of work, dropped by the station to visit his buddies. Taking note of the composite on a bulletin board, he said it bore a glancing resemblance to a guy who broke his jaw at Lefty’s, a bar on Washington that was now a coffee shop. The guy’s name, Simms recalled, sounded Irish and started with an H. He asked somebody to look it up. Harold James Healy.

2) Later that day, a Fort Lauderdale sergeant called Beach detectives and told them they might want to take a look at a bouncer in a joint called Sailor Randy’s.

And 3): Yesterday, an FBI fingerprint search spit out a match for a partial that had been lifted from the stereo in Manfred Pfiser’s room. It was identified as belonging to one Harold James Healy, last known address, New York City. With no help from the general populace, Harold James Healy was glowing super-nova hot.

Score one for Martinson.

The one thing they gained by releasing the composite was the likelihood of alerting the suspect to his status. And they created a task that would tie up Ron Robotaille for days. He was watching a tips hotline right now, unwrapping a piece of candy and sticking it into his mouth.

The FBI faxed a nice, neat package. Healy was born on 12/16/61 in Manhattan, and took his first fall on 5/23/78, for being a passenger in a stolen car. He earned an Adjournment Contemplating Dismissal.

On 11/12/90, he was arrested for possession of a controlled substance, codeine, and issued a summons. The judge slapped his wrist and Healy managed to outmaneuver the law until 8/15/94, when he was charged with assault in New York. His attorney plea-bargained it down to being a patron of a disorderly premises.

He did his very first bit a year later right here in the Dade County Jail. Tumbling on a slew of charges, including assaulting an officer, he got off easy. Nine months inside. Acevedo studied the mugs from Healy’s most recent bust. The French chick had a point. He did kind of look like Robotaille. It was a stretch, but Lili could see it.

She slanted her eyes at Robotaille, who was wearing a bored expression, taking an obligatory note from somebody on the phone. She looked from the mug shot to the composite to Robotaille. Healy wasn’t what you’d think of as ugly, but he was no Ron Robotaille.

Ron was great looking, and he was a nice guy, too, but he was so dull he made you want to scream. It took Lili two dates to figure it out. They had a decent, unexciting time at a restaurant in Aventura, and another night they went to see a boring movie, Robotaille’s choice, then for drinks in the Grove. Somehow or other, they wound up in Lili’s apartment.

Wait a minute. This was dishonest thinking. They wound up in Lili’s apartment because she was entertaining the idea of having sex with him, but when they got there, he wouldn’t shut up about his soon-to-be-ex-wife, which turned off Lili like a light switch. Robotaille managed to put two and two together. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew he’d blown it, and he didn’t ask Lili out again. Only now, even their most mundane exchanges were strained with a clumsiness that wouldn’t have been there if not for those two dates. Lili was sorry she’d bothered. If he wasn’t so handsome, and Lili hadn’t been so flattered, she wouldn’t have.